In the manor that once belonged to his brother, I sit with Jor'Mari, the two of us alone around a wooden table. They've gone now. Haford was the first to leave. Bali came. Gods, it feels like forever since the last time I saw her. She hasn't changed, still the same warm woman that kept the world looking straight, always there to fix what she can. She told me about how everyone else is doing. The cost of sending people through the open gateway on the palace plaza is too high to send everyone over. Then, my brother went away with her, out to see the city, to take her around to the hospitals so that she could help out with her magic.

There is something between the two of them, something I caught when they left. It's good. I'm happy for them.

Then Dovik left too, back to sit in Jess' room of white curtains. He spends every night there, sleeping in that chair, using a ragged, red blanket as a pillow. I don't know what to do for her. All my life, people spoke of injury as a thing only the poor needed to suffer. In the cities there you can find people with magic powerful enough to cure the ailment. There, the church held alms days twice a month, where their priests would lay hands upon sick children to take away their illness with Exeter's power. Hells, we even had a few competent healers in Westgrove, and that was a trip you could make in a day with a decent horse.

This was different. What happened to Jess, it is something that even Iona can't solve with her magic. The only solutions Corinth had involved going halfway around the world and hoping that someone he met five years ago was still in the city. Shouldn't he have been able to do something himself? He's a fifth-rank magician; he is extremely powerful with spellcraft. How could this be beyond him?

Dovik spends all his evenings there, just sleeping away the midnight hours next to her. I can't stay there. I can't talk pleasantly, exchange words about nothing with the others, while she lies right there, like we are pretending she is awake and fine. It's not that. I know it isn't, but it still feels that way.

Jor'Mari swirls his glass, the bottom of the cup echoing a long scratch as the edge grinds against the wood. With his chin on his arm, he stares at the empty bottle in the middle of the table. The single light overhead throws a shadow from the battle that falls over his face. He doesn't see the glass or the alcohol; his eyes are fixed on a location that isn't right now.

"What are you thinking about?" I can't help but ask it.

It takes him a moment, the present slowly coming back to him. The first thing he sees is that empty bottle. He blinks once, then again, as the present comes rushing back in, the gliding glass in his hand falling still. "Nothing," he says.

"Wish I could do that."

"Thirty months," he says, pulling himself off the table, falling back in his chair with one leg kicked over the arm. The usual robe is gone. Not to say that he isn't wearing a shirt that might as well be a robe, but I can see the change.

"Thirty months what?"

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"Until the city is back to normal," he says, vaguely motioning out the window. "Until it's all put back together just like it was. That's what Jav said, just like it was the most casual thing in the world. 'Thirty months and it will be right.' But then I understood what he was really talking about. It's not just all of Danfalla, he just means the palace district. Thirty months, and we up here won't see the difference. I didn't think he was like Fas, that he saw what was happening beyond these walls, but he doesn't. We still have monsters roaming through the countryside. There are towns out there tonight that are being ripped to pieces while the adventurers who stayed try their damndest to clean it all up. More than half of them left when the barrier around the duchy fell, and half of those left when Sagistan did. The act of killing the beast at the center of this tide was the same as finishing them off. Fucking, thirty months."

Leaning over the table, I pull a bottle of half-drunk wine from my vault, letting it rattle to the top of the table. I crack the top when I pull the cork. A shard of glass sticks in my finger, no pain. Time passes me by for a few seconds as I can't help but stare. Green glass, just a bit, sticking into my hand, but I can hardly feel it. The splinter falls away with a brush, the edge turned into finely ground bits that glow away like sand. It's so odd that only now should I start to realize how much my body has been changing.

It just never hit me before, and it seems so strange that I shouldn't have noticed or cared before. One day, I had been reborn almost, my entire appearance changing, as I integrated a set of essentia. I knew from then that I was different, changed. Then, it kept happening: every point put into an attribute is a change, every new bit of power I managed. It wasn't growing literal wings from my back, wasn't finding the channels of power running through my body, wasn't even having to control those channels with my spirit like I was pushing around the veins of my body, that makes me really begin to feel it. It is this moment, looking down at the broken piece of glass, a sharp point made into dust because my skin is just tough now, that makes me really feel it. I'm not the same girl I was just a year ago, not even close, and I don't know where she went.

"What are you thinking about?" Jor'Mari asks.

Then I am brought back, flicking away the piece of glass to slide away into the dark at the edge of the room. "Nothing," I answer, taking away his glass to pour him some of the wine. It is shit wine, but all wine is really.

He watches me walk around the table with the glass in my hand, pushing his chair back to let me fall and sit on the arm of it. I hold the glass to his face with my right hand, my left holding onto the back of his chair to keep my balance. There is something in his eyes as he looks at me. I feel his warmth as he leans forward, taking the offered sip. He falls back in the chair, looking up at me as I take a drink of my own.

Then, he says it, says the words I am afraid he will say. "Stay."

I finish the glass, tossing it onto the table to roll away and clatter to the floor on the other side. It doesn't break, just bounces, rolling away. "I can't," I tell him.

He looks at me with that smirk of his, the one that cuts through me. "I know." There is defeat in his words.

I lean on him, bringing his lips to mine. There is no defeat in me, not right now. I make sure he knows how I feel right now with him. "I have to go," I tell him, setting my forehead on his. "But it doesn't have to be tonight."

Then his hands are on me, and mine are on him. We grab and hold each other. Then we are on the table, then the bench in his room, ending up on the bed. I finally feel what love is tonight, or maybe just a corner of it. I just wish it didn't have to end.

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